Friday, October 9, 2015 - 10:30am

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Michael Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. A native of New Zealand, he currently lives in Austin, Texas, and is the former Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Witbrock was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Cycorp, he was a principal scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge-based approaches to understanding Web user behavior; he has also been associated with Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center and the Informedia Digital Library at Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Witbrock's dissertation work was on speaker modeling; before going to Cycorp, he published in a broad range of areas, including: neural networks; multimedia information retrieval; genetic design; computational linguistics; speech recognition; and, web-browser design. His work at Cycorp has focused on improving its knowledge formation efforts, particularly dialogue processing, and on improving accessibility to the Cyc project.